November
8
Slumdog Millionaire's R Rating, Subtitles, Score
Slumdog Millionaire played great at my Sneak Previews series. While these film fans are slightly older than the pic's target audience, they ate it up.
A show of hands during the Q & A with director Danny Boyle did reveal that slightly more of them believe the movie deserves its R rating. Boyle admits that he lost that rating on appeal after trying to earn a PG-13. The ratings board couldn't tell him anything to cut. The rating was for overall intensity. Which is certainly the case. Fox Searchlight accepted Boyle's cut.
On a second viewing, Slumdog--executed with great energy by Boyle's team--owes a great deal to the script by Simon Beaufoy and the propulsive score by A.R. Rahman, who Boyle hired after Jack White proved unavailable. (He did find time to write the Quantum of Solace Bond theme).
Boyle set out to make an English language movie, but his casting director told him that the kids he liked best didn't speak English. So he translated the material with the kids into Hindi, about a third of the movie, he said. And he uses subtitles in a different way, coloring them and moving them around the screen, not sticking them on the bottom. Some of the folks in the class were challenged by not having white titles where they expect them. Boyle wanted to move their focus around the screen, he said.
Todd McCarthy thinks Boyle should direct the next Bond film.
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meh, i think filmmakers need to stop worrying about the R or PG-13 ratings. If anything, PG-13 films usually BLOW because the director is so desperate to trim down the violence, sex and cussing.
they ruined "Max Payne" the movie because they wanted it to appeal to 13 years old boys by trimming down the movie and it's lame as hell. If they had gone for the R rating, it would have been WAY better.
Posted by: UGLY PUNK GURL! | November 08, 2008 at 07:05 PM
i think it already is a pg-13 film, but because it's not a true studio then it got an R. Teens smoking cigarettes is an automatic R these days.
Posted by: seanH | November 09, 2008 at 02:43 AM
Let's be honest, the abuse of children and the torture scenes were disturbing; it deserves an "R" rating.
Posted by: Carl | December 06, 2008 at 07:44 PM
film makers usually try to make a PG -movie into a PG 13 just to appeal to a broader audience. They just have to throw one ramdom F-bomb into a disney-type movie and earn millions more.
Posted by: j. | January 15, 2009 at 05:47 PM
I heard that the only gory part is that the kids get their eyes burned out and cut out.
Posted by: Anyonymous | March 24, 2009 at 07:31 PM